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one, and being in St. Cecilia makes my romantic sensibilityworse rather than better. There are times when I like to sit and watch Sara when she does not know I am watching her, and I have caught her looking at me often enough to like it when such a gaze is headed in my direction. So I did not look up for a long while, keeping my head down and scribbling away, basking in the glow of knowing I was being watched by the one I love and who inexplicably loves me. Knowing that if I looked at her, the spell would be broken, and I did not want that to happen.
    But the observer kept making noises here and there, and it became so obvious I figured that, for whatever reason, she wanted me to look in her direction. It turned out I had spent a half hour or so basking in the glow of a gaze from a monkey. It was eying my coffee mug, I think, when I started so violently that it was startled too, and the monkey took off up the hill.
    If you mention the birds and the lizards and the monkeys to anyone who lives on the island, they nod as though it is perfectly normal to share a cottage with wildlife. From time to time, as if to be reassuring, oneof them will remind you that there are no snakes on St. Cecilia. I want to believe them, but I am unsure about the judgment of people who keep monkeys for pets.

    The end of bird-feeding time on the porch roughly corresponds to the time when the sun has finally worked its way high enough in the sky for me to be in the sun down on the patio, so I wander back up the stairs to say good morning and to find some more coffee. The sunning round is about to begin.

    It is best to do your sunning in the morning here. The sun is too intense in the middle of the day, and the early afternoons are for napping. Unless, of course, the scribbling round has worn you out already and you are compelled to take a short nap before lunch in order to be able to sit up and take nourishment.
    I do not know what it is about sitting in the sun that is so appealing. I do know there are feelings of warmth and of well-being that come with being browned by the sun, and I have not yet arrived at a place where I can pass it up.
    The sunning round includes lunch, before or after or during. The choice varies according to the weather and the plans for the evening, if they have been made, and the estimated length of the napping round soon to follow. Those estimates vary according to the potential for rain, the hour one went to bed the night before, and whether or not one is still pink from yesterday’s sunning round.
    Some days we go out for lunch, most often to the same little place in town. We do that on the days we have to go to the market to lay in more supplies. And on Sundays we enjoy going out for brunch to a restaurant nearby that reminds us of one of our favorite brunch places back in Tennessee.
    But most days we make a sandwich or two and stay home. Fried bologna is the sandwich of choice when weare at the beach. We fell in love for all kinds of reasons. Discovering that we both liked fried-bologna sandwiches was simply the icing on the cake, so to speak.
    One of us will set the table on the porch, complete with books and something for the birds, who are working on their twelfth meal for the day. The other one will make the lunch. We will sit in the breeze and read our books and watch the straits for signs of changing weather and for the return of the fishing boats and the occasional sailboat drifting by on its way to the bay below. Or some souls who think they must be windsurfing or kayaking in order to have a good time.

    The good part about staying at Seastone for lunch is that it hastens the napping round.
    Ceiling fans are one of God’s great gifts to humankind. Cool sheets and two pillows and a book, the sound of the sea crashing and rumbling around on the rocks below, the clack-clack of the palms, the twitter ofbirds, and the occasional whistle of the breeze through the screens—all of these make for a perfect nap.